Free They Do the Same Things Different There by Robert Shearman Page A

got left are these old vegetables. . . .”
    And he’s gone. And you’re into panel four. The final panel on a weekday
Peanuts
strip is panel four, and it has a special job—it needs to sum up the world weariness and despair that is the hallmark of the cartoon at its best. To take all the hope that was present in the first three panels and show that it is wanting. To demonstrate that at best, life is an awkward compromise we all just have to buckle down and accept. You don’t know how to convey all that. All eyes are on you. You stare down at the awful food in your supper bowl. You roll your eyes. You send up a thought bubble. “Good grief,” you think.
    And it’s a wrap.
    The strip is printed in the newspapers the very next day. The world is glad to see that Snoopy is back again, even if he’s sporting a zip.
    You soon find out, in the absence of a really good punch line, rolling your eyes and thinking “Good grief” tends to work pretty well.

    Sometimes the supporting cast come to see you. Linus says, “You are exploiting the grief of someone who is suffering, don’t you feel ashamed?” And then quotes some Bible verses at you, and that’s so
very
Linus—and you want to say, if you’re so smug and sanctimonious, why do you carry a security blanket? No, you don’t feel ashamed, because
Snoopy
wouldn’t feel ashamed—that was the point of Snoopy, can’t they see that, he had no conscience at all. You just lie on the roof of the kennel and let their criticisms wash right over you. Lucy is more direct, as usual; she says she wants to slug you; she says she wants to pound you. The best way to deal with Lucy is to call her “sweetie” and kiss her on the nose, that never fails to infuriate her.
    Incidentally, it’s hard to sleep on the roof of a kennel, especially one that tapers into such a very sharp point. It took you a week to learn how to do it without falling off. And even now, you haven’t found a way of lying there without the pain, it jabs right into your spine, it’s agony. Thank God your contorted face is masked beneath that Snoopy head. Thank God your Snoopy head is fixed in that expression of cute self-satisfaction.
    Woodstock comes by only the once. He jabbers at you, and he’s angry, but you’ve no idea what he’s saying, his speech bubbles are full of nothing more than vertical lines. And you tire of him, and you punch him—you thwack him with your paw and it says, “Ka-pow!”—and Woodstock is lying still on the grass for ages, and you wonder whether you’ve killed him. (And wonder whether it would matter; if the
Peanuts
strip can survive the death of the original Snoopy, who cares about the fate of a little bird that wasn’t even given a name for the first twenty years of syndication?) But Woodstock
does
revive. And he flies away. And you never see him again.
    The only one you need to keep happy is Charlie Brown. And Charlie Brown is
very
happy; he brings you fresh bowls of dog food every day, and you wolf them down, and dance the happy dance for real. He’s the butt of all your jokes, but he has faith in you, and you have faith in him—life will knock the stuffing out of Charlie Brown each and every day, but he rolls with the punches, he keeps coming back for more. It’s harder to be a Charlie Brown than a Snoopy. You have to admire him a bit for it.
    You try out Snoopy’s tried and tested specialty acts. You fly your kennel into World War I, and fight the Germans. The first time you strap on your goggles you think maybe something magical will happen, that you’ll really take off into the air, that you’ll really have to dodge the bullets of enemy fire. And you feel a bit disappointed at first that it’s all pretend—of course it’s all pretend, and it always was. But there’s a certain thrill to it, that you have a nemesis, the Red Baron, even if it’s just a made-up nemesis. And every time he shoots you down you shake your fist up to heaven and curse him, and